_. GRE SHAM COLLEGE -

PREMIERSHIP

,

Lecture 6

‘SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE’: PREMIERSHIP FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

by

PROFESSOR PETER HE~ESSY BA PhD Gresham Professor of Rhetoric

5 March 1996 GRESHM COLLEGE RHETORIC LECTURES, 1995-96. ‘PREMIERSHIP’ PETER HENNESSY, GRESHM PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC LECTURE SIX: 5 WCH 1996

‘“SHADOM AND SUBSTANCE”: PREMIERSHIP FOR THE WENTY-FIRST CENTURY.’

This may strike you as very odd, but, when, in the historical sense, you’ve spent as much time in the company of past premiers as I have while preparing this year’s series of lectures, you become rather sorry for them as a breed almost to the point of agreeing with Stanley Baldwin that: ‘There are three classes which need sanctuary more than others – birds, wild flowers and Prime Ministers.’lWhy is this? Partly because as Lord Hailsham has described, they rarely die happy. (’1 mean it doesn’t lead to happiness’, was how he put it when asked if he regretted that the prize had not fallen into his lap in October 19632);and partly because I tend to subscribe to what one might call ‘Enoch’s Law of ’ which the singular Mr Powell advanced in a fond treatment of ‘Rab’ Butler’s career. ‘In politics of all callings’, he wrote, ‘the test of success or failure is so unsure that one is tempted to wonder whether there is such a thing as true political success at all: failure, or frustration, or reversal, seems so much to be the essence of any political career.’3

I am sure this is especially true of those who fill the premiership. To reach the single most powerful public and political position in the land and yet, inevitably, to discover in one’s declining years that one’s impact on such a torpid, traditional in many ways apolitical society as ours can only lend itself to a succession of broody might-have-beens left festering in the mind of the once mighty. That, I suspect, is what Lord Hailsham had in mind about the lack of contentment among the Honorable Society of Ex-Premiers (Though I suspect Clem Attleeand Alec Home were free of this incubus. They both spent their Iast years painfully missing their wives who pre-deceased them but that is a very different kind of affliction).

1 But I have not stood up before you today to break-open phials of soothing ointment over the bruised egos of old statesmen. There was nothing compulsory or obligatory about their wielding authority over their Cabinet, their party, our Parliament, and, by extens on, over us. For another part of me is in tune with at least the first half of another Baldwinism– ‘Never complain and never explain.’4

My purpose in the final lecture of this year’s series is to look at the demands upon the office of Prime Minister and those who fi11 t as the century turns. And I approach this task in a very tentative spirit. Not for me the easy, almost casual certainty of the inventor of the pillar box and political novelist supreme, Anthony Trollope, who, through the mouth of the Duke of St Bungay declared:

‘One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid; bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all a thick skin.’s

Late twentieth century Britain is very different from mid to late nineteenth when, in Trollope’s fictional characterisation at least, ‘the most moving sources of our national excitement seemed to have vanished from life’ yet ‘the Government was carried on and the country was prosperous.’6

For all the vicissitudes experienced by our country since relative decline began to span the polished carapace of our nineteenth century military and industrial $uperpowerdom, it is still difficult to arouse a genuine or a widespread concern about what Disraeli called ‘the condition of the people’7 in not so much the social, but in the wider, political, governmental and institutionalsense. Richard Hoggart captured this paradox quite marvelously last year when he wrote:

2

— What an extraordinary feat it is that the British can so easily assume so much continuity and security; on the one hand, a feat

Of sleep walking; on the other founded in a near reality, in the assertion that order will survive. We had a civil war three centuries ago; some major centres of population were badly bombed in the last war, and there have since been some temporary and local breakdowns of order. There can be no suitable comparisons here with, say, Belgium or France or many another West and East European nation. No Holocaust, no Balkan-style disturbances...no ethnic cleansing.’s

All true though I would add \don’t forget Northern Ireland after 1969’. And yet complacency should not be the condition of the political nation in 1996. A Duke of Omniumor a Trollopian style of premiership simply does not fit the bill today and it has not for a very long time past, though Churchill might have been thought to be attempting it during his second and last spell in No.1O with his initial taste for ‘overlord’ ministers and that distinct flavour of ‘pageantry’ which Roy Jenkins detected in the old man’s singular way of conducting the premiership.g

One must be careful, however, not to let style overlay or camouflage substance. There was something relentless about the increasing workload of British Prime Ministers as the postwar period deepened. In last year’s Gresham series I examined the almost india rubber stretching of the scope and reach of the office of Prime Minister as illustrated by an analysis of the functions of the job carried out by the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and No.1O between 1947 and 1949 in Mr Attlee’s time’”and by me, unofficially, in 1995 in the absence of any internal Whitehall replica of the late 1940s exercise.11

I hope you’ll forgive me if I reprise the findings of my efforts before offering a set of new and different-but-related measurements to illustrate what one might call the phenomenon of creeping-overload-at-the-top. From a dozen prime ministerial functions identified by William Armstrong and his colleagues in the late 1940s12(though, had I been consulted, I would have

3 added a further seven13),the total, by my reckoning, had increased to 33 in themid-1990s, a figure which, like its late Forties precursor, excluded party as opposed to governmental duties. A breakdown of the 1995 audit shows:

seven constitutional and procedural finctions; sixdealingwith appointments; sixdealingwith the conductor Cabinet andparliamentary business; seven touching organisational and efficiency questions; two concerning sensitive Budget andmarket-related matters; roundedoffby five special foreign and defencefinctions.

Range of activity is one thing, frequency however, is quite another. And here what actually passed over prime ministerial desks is the next puzzle to be pondered and its key lies in the Public Record Office, at least for the period up to and including-1965-.

Mercifully, the PRO has allocated special classes for Prime Ministers’ papers in the postwar period - PREM8 for Attlee; PREM 11 for the four Conservative Prime Ministers between 1951 and 1964; and PREM 13 for Wilson after 1964. , Culling and categorizing them has proved to be a revealing and fascinating exercise but, before exposing the results, I must come clean about its crudities. These are of two main kinds: not every file that crossed the PM’s desk is to be found within the bounds of the PREM classes. Some of them lie scattered across various Cabinet office series; the intelligencematerial, an occasional mistake apart, has been stripped from the PREM series for the postwar period leaving no trace, for example, of the regular flowof so-called ‘CX’ reports from the Secret Intelligence Service.14 Secondly, mY ctitegorisationsof files by type are necessarily imperfect. For example, sometimes material dealing with atomic weapons is best placed under the headingof ‘Defence’.At other times it fits more accurately under the caption ‘Foreign Policy (USA).’ Others, too, might have chosen a different varietyof labels to pick from. Anyway, here iS the result. Let’s take first Mr Attlee’s tally for 1948 (see Table I).

TA8LE 1

PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE: PAPERS AND CORRESPONDENCE (INDIVIDUAL FILES)

CLEMENT ATTLEE 1948

1: Imperial/Commonwealth 54 2: Economic/Industrial/Regulatory 42 3: Defence 39 4: Foreign Policy (excluding USA & Middle East) 26 5: Whitehall/Ministerial/ Constitutional/Parliamentary 18 6: Domestic Policy 14 7: Security/Intelligence 5 8-.-. Foreign Policy (USA) 4 8=: Foreign Policy (Middle East) 4 8.=. Monarchy 4 11=.. Trades Unions/Strikes/Pay 2 11=: Ireland (excluding NI) 2 13: Party Matters (Labour) 1

TOTAL 21515

5 I chose 1948 as the year to measure because the comparisons I am about to make are, relatively speaking, for peacetime years and I wanted to move beyond the immediate shadow of World War II, some of whose unfinished business might have produced an abnormal workload. Distortions there are, of course, in 1948. For example, the leading category by volume, Imperial/Commonwealth,is distended by the transferor power in the sub-continent. India accounts for 25 of those 54 items.

Apart from the overall total of 215 files (some of which, as with all the twelve-months surveyed, ran-on from previous years), what is striking is the preponderance of foreign, defence and imperial concerns as an absorber of prime ministerial time. Imperial and Commonwealth alone outstripped the Economic/Industrial/Regulatorycategory at a time of a considerable shift to the public sector and the continuing transfer of industry to a peacetime footing..The.DomesticPolicy item,.too,-.I-f~.ndsurp-r~s_i_ngly_low_i_n_a.year.when the last big piece of the postwar welfare state– the National Health Service – was put into place.

Let’s turn nowto the supposedly relatively hands-off premiership of Winston , Churchill. He was re-elected in 1951 partlyon a ticket of reducing the waste and bureaucracy of what he liked to depict as a Socialist Government.16 I have taken 1952, the first full year of his last premiership, asmy test-bed. There are distortions here, chiefly under the Monarchy category as following George VI’s death in February 1952, considerable effort was put into preparing for the Coronation of the present Queen, a matter in which Churchill took an intense personal interest.17

But look at that total: 314 items, 46 percent upon Attlee’s consignment four years earlier. (See Table II). The primacy of Defence is no surprise. It was his great preoccupation. Foreign Policy (USA) is surprisingly low given the immense importancehe placed on restoring the ‘special relationship’ which he thought had decayed under Attlee, in nuclear collaboration especially.1*

6 TABLE II PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE: PAPERS AND CORRESPONDENCE (INDIVIDUAL FILES)

WINSTON CHURCHILL 1952 (1948)

1: Defence 66 (39;3) 2: Economic/Industrial/ Regulatory 65 (42;2) 3: Foreign Policy (excluding USA & Middle East) 53 (26;4) 4: Whitehall/Ministerial/ Constitutional/Parliamentary 38 (18;5) 5=: Domestic Policy 20 (14;6) 5.=. Security/Intelligence 20 ( 5;7) 7: Foreign Policy (Middle East) 17 ( 4;8=) 8: Monarchy 14 ( 4;8=) 9: Imperial/Commonwealth 10 (54;1) 10: Foreign Policy (USA) 9 ( 9;8) 11: Trade Unions/Strikes/Pay 2 ( 2;11=) 12: Ireland (excluding NI) ( 2;11=) 13: Party Matters ( 1;13)

TOTAL 314 19

(% increase on 1948 = 46%) Lord Salisbury (the prime ministerial Marquess not ‘Bobbety’ who resigned ostensibly over the return of Makarios to Cyprus in lg5720)would have been fascinatedto observe the remorseless riseof prime ministerial actively over the six years form Churchill in 1952 to Macmillan’s first full year in office in 1958 in a kind of malign contraflow with Britain’s decreasing influence in the world post-Suez given his (Salisbury’s) distrust of expert advice in particular21and his skepticism about government intervention in general. The Suez shadow is pronounced here with Foreign Policy (Middle East) in third place, though Defence has tailed off somewhat from its Churchillian pre- eminence (See Table III). TA8LE III PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE: PAPERS AND CORRESPONDENCE (INDIVIDUAL FILES).

HAROLD MACMILLAN 1958 (1952) (1948) 1: Foreign Policy (excluding USA& Middle East) 75 (53;3) (26;4) 2: Imperial/Commonwealth 58 (10;9) (54;1) 3: Foreign Policy (Middle East) 43 (17;7) ( 4;8=) 4: Economic/Industrial/Regulatory 42 (65;2) (42;2) 5: Defence 41 (66;1) (39;3) 6: Whitehall/Ministerial/ Constitutional/Parliamentary 40 (38;4) (18;5) 7: Domestic Policy 20 (20;5=) (14;6) 8: Foreign Policy (USA) 14 ( 9;10) ( 4;8=) 9: Monarchy 9 (14;8) ( 4;8=) 10: Trades Unions/Strikes/Pay 8 (2;11) (2;11=) 11: Security/Intelligence 6 (20;5=) ( 5;7) 12: Party Matters

(Con 1; Lab 2) 3 (-) ( 1;13) 13: Ireland (excluding NI) 1 (-) ( 2;11=) TOTAL 36W

(% increases = on 1948=67%; on 1952 = 15%) It was the release of the 1965 files for Harold Wilson’s first full year as Prime Minster which triggered the idea of this exercise in my mind for, to carry on the percussive metaphor, there had, quite plainly, been an explosion of activity since the late 1950s. The tally of files was up 63%on Macmillan’s 1958 figure, 87% on Churchi11’s 1952 accumulation anda staggering 173% on his Labour predecessor’s score 17 years earlier. (See Table IV). Part of the inflation can be attributed to the Rhodesia crisis (34 of those Imperial/Commonwealthfiles dealt with it) and, given Wilson’s delight in tinkering with the machinery of government and its minders, the Whitehall/Ministerial/Constitutional/Parliamentary item is understandably if unusually high.

10 TABLE IV

PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE: PAPERS ANDCORRESPONDENCE (INDIVIDUAL FILES) .

HAROLDWILSON 1965 (1958) (1952) (1948) 1: Imperial/Commonwealth 117 (58;2) (10;9) (54;1) 2: Whitehall/Ministerial/ Constitutional/Parliamentary 110 (40;6) (38;4) (18;5) 3: Economic/Industrial/ Regulatory 102 (42;4) (65;2) (42;2) 4: Foreign Policy (excluding USA & Middle East) 93 (75;1) (53;3) (26;4) 5: Domestic Policy 52 (20;7) (20;5=) (14;6) 6: Foreign Policy (USA) 38 (14;8) ( 9;10) (4;8=) 7: Defence 37 (41;5) (66;1) (39;3) 8: Trades Unions/Strikes/Pay 10 ( 8;10) ( 2;11) (2;11=) 9: Foreign Policy (Middle East) 9 (43;3) (17;7) (4;8=) 10: Monarchy 8 ( 9;9) (14;8) ( 4;8=) 11: Security/Intelligence 6 ( 6;11) (20;5=) ( 5;7) 12: Party Matters

(Con 1; Lab 2) 3 (3;12) (-) (1;13)

13: Ireland (excluding NI) 1 ( 1;13) (-) (2;11=)

TOTAL 58623

(% increases: on 1948 = 7M; on 1952 = 87%; on 1958 = 63%)

11 “

This is what I had in mind when in my fourth Gresham Lecture in this series I described Wilson as ‘almost a natural generator of “overload’”24– a very high price to pay, I think, for his determination to turn No.1O from an alleged ‘monastery’ into a putative ‘powerhouse’.*s

Crude though these file-based comparisons are, they do, I think, amount to a new and useful indicator of “overload”. To the best of my knowledge they have not been compiled here before nor does my friend Professor Richard Neustadt think there is anything comparable for the US Presidency in the postwar period.X Their value is demonstrated by the itch I have for the impossible — access to the files of successor prime ministers since 1965. For the period in which the archival treasure has still to reach the Public Record Office we are very much in the dark.

Wi-l.son--aflforded-one.-last-beam-of -i.nsi.ght-fo~.the--tw.i.l.i.ght.-o.f-h.i~..-l.as.t premiership, however. As befitted aformer Presidentof the Royal Statistical Society27,he published, in his The Governance of Britain, an analysis of his diary for the period 1 October to 31 December 1975. It reads as follows:

12 I

TABLE V

PATTERN OF PRIME MINISTERIAL BUSINESS, 1 OCTOBER - 31 DECEMBER 1975.

1: Ministerial meetings (excluding Cabinet or Cabinet committees) 43 2: Meetings with industry, prominent industrialists etc. 28 3: Official meetings (unspecified) 27 4: Cabinet committee 24 5: Official lunches and dinners 20 6: Ministerial speeches 17 7: Visits within Britain 13 8= Cabinet meetings 11 8= Political meetings (no speech) 11 10 Political speeches 9 11= Audiences of the Queen 8 11= Receiving foreign VIPs 8 11= TV or radio broadcasts (excluding party conference) 8 14: Visits by heads of government 5 15: Visits abroad 2 16= Visits to Northern Ireland 1 16= State visits 12s

13 Rather plaintivelyWilson added to that list: ‘Christmasapart, I was not able to record a single private or social engagement.’29

Sadly, there is nothing comparable in Mrs Thatcher’sThe Downing Street Years. All we get is the following passage (though it’s quite a revealing one):

‘The hours at No.1O are long. I never minded this. There was an intensity about the job of being Prime Minister which made sleep seem a luxury. In any case, over the years I had trained myself to do with about four hours a night. The Private Office too would often be working till 11 o’clock at night. We were so few that there was no possibilityof putting work on someone else’s desk. This sort of atmosphere helps to produce a remarkably happy team, as well as a formidably efficient one. People are under great .pressure,.and there.i.s..no–t.ime..fortr.iv.ia...Al.thehefifo~towaswto-to— go into getting the work done.’30

‘No time for trivia’. There’s a phrase to savour. I was struck over a period of 13 years (which is the gap between the two dramatic and highly unusual , insights into the most secret processes of 1980s policy-making – the Franks Report of 198231 and the Scott Report of 199632) by just how little (especiallyinthe case of arms andequipment to Iraq; less sothe Falklands) reached prime ministerial level in No.1O at the time for all the attention they demanded and got from Mrs Thatcher ( in the case of the Falklands) and MrMajor (on arms to Iraq) at a later stage. I shall return in a moment toMrs Thatcher’s point about her slimline back-up in No.1O.

First its another aspect for her premiership that I wish to dwell on (linking it to the width of material I have culled from the PREM 8, 11 and 13 series at the PRO) before moving on to what might be done to tone up the premiership for the twenty-first century. Constantly Mrs Thatcher would remind her ministerial colleagues that she, as Prime Minister, felt herself ‘ of the strategy’ hence her habit of interveningearly and often in ministerial discussions.33 Guarding a government’s overall strategy has been a key

14 function of all our postwar premiers whether they were overly intrusive in the Cabinet Room or not. It was – is – a function which falls into every PM’s lap. No-one else can be expected to do it even if they predesignated ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ with co-ordination and Cabinet committee functions as in the case of R.A.Butler in 1962-63M and even more so of Michael Heseltine in 1995.35

This requires premiers to be kept Up to speed on a huge range of matters –

issues which only they can, in the end, handle; issues of such a magnitude that they invoke questions of collective responsibilityat their most intense; issues that could steal up on a government suddenly and, sometimes (I’m thinking of the Falklands again) in a manner that can threaten a premier’s, , even an administration’s survival.

The federal nature of Whitehall demands a high degree of policy devolution from the centre but it has to be both a knowledgeableand an essentially sympathetic form of devolution. As Ferdinand Mount (a man with direct experience ofNo.10 life as the Head of Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit in 1982-83) put it in his marvellously sensitive novel based on the life of Lord Aberdeen, ‘George [as Prime Minster] encouraged and nudged and approved [Gladstone at the Treasury, Palmerston at the Home Office and Wood at the India Office]. These were nothis fields, but he was happyto lean on the gate and watch them grow.’36

The PREM files for more modern times show, too, an intriguing and important linkage with the wider analysis of the centre of central government–the so- called ‘core executive’ approach – developed by British political scientists over the past decade. As one of its leading lights, Professor Rod Rhodes, has put it, it’s time to get away from ‘the textbook prime minster’37 and into the wider realms of a premiership in the context of that ‘core executive’ which he describes as ‘all those organisations and procedures which co- ordinate central government polices, and act as final arbiters of conflict between different parts of the government machine.’38An historian’s trawl through the Prime Minister’s Office files at any point in the postwar period

15 would illustratejust such linkages and processes in routine abundance though, as my observations on the Franks and Scott reports underlined, it would be wrong to think that all powerlines and every delicate issue find their way automatically into No.1O.

This brings us to the matter of what should find its way into No.1O, how should it be handled when it gets there and by whom? Immediately this raises the old question of the desirability or otherwise of a Prime Minster’s Department – old in the sense that Lloyd George established a short-lived prototype with his Prime Minister’s Secretariat of 1917-1839and every modern Prime Minster since Wilson Mark I at least has toyed privately with the possibility of establishing such a body only to reject it.40The idea only has to be raised to horrify most other ministers as well as the Cabinet Office, the institutionalguardian of the collective approach. Immediately it –...–sugges.ts_an...imbalance_at_the._cent_~e_,_a4istMLbance~f that concert of constitutional forces which, most of the time, restrains the potentially overmighty occupant at No.10. Sir Burke Trend, who as Cabinet Secretary always saw himself as the servant of the full Cabinet as well as the nearest thing to a permanent secretary a PM has, liked to remark whenever the idea , refloated: ‘By all means have a Prime Minister’s Department provided it is always called the Cabinet Office.’41

The shadowof such a department, however, should not put into the shade other ideas for both human and procedural rejigging in No.1O. The last 20 years have seen two profound and seemingly permanent ones – the bolting-on to the traditional Private Office of a Prime Ministers’ Policy Unit since 1974 (which three PM’s since Wilson have kept and refashioned for their own use42) and the development of an ever more powerful Press Office in tune with what Michael Foley has described as the media-driven ‘leadership stretch’ which

really has opened up clear water between the Prime Minster and other ministers in terms of press attention.43

16 The last 20 years have also witnessed a growing sense that the centre, No.1O in particular, is too weak to carry the load it’s required to bear under modern conditions. As a result of their combined experience in the Cabinet Office from themid-1970s to the early 1980s Sir John Hunt, the former Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Kenneth Berrill, former Head of the Central Policy Review Staff, the fabled and still missed ‘think tank’, took to the lecture halls in retirement to highlight this theme.~ They were followed in short order by Sir Douglas Wass, former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in his 1983 Reith Lectures45and after a ten-year gap by Ferdinand Mount, ex-head of the Policy Unit.tiThe notion of a beefed-up No.1O has been taken up once more in recent months by the immensely knowledgeableAndrew Marr of The IndeDendent47and in the recent days by Peter Mandelson, very much a Tony Blair confidant with a special brief to shadow and examine the Civil Service.4*

Asking a historian, who has left a part of his youth at the Public Record Office while rummaging through those prime ministerial files and Cabinet Office papers over the past 20 years,49 ‘can premiers be efficient?’ has, in many ways, the charmingly naive air of a recent leading article in the Jesuit journal, The Month, which inquired ‘can politicians be holy?’50 It is, however, a theme worth pursuing even by the relatively illusion-freewhen it comes to prime ministerial adequacy let alone perfectibility given the difficulties and the stresses they face under modern governing conditions. So, by the way rounding-off this year’s Gresham series, I propose to review a selection of the various critiques and reform proposals on offer over the past 15 years before finishing up with a few suggestions of my own.

Berrill and Hunt were not the bureaucratic equivalents of John Mackintosh51 and Dick Crossman.52They did not believe either that Britain m become a prime ministerially governed nation nor did they wish it to be. Essentially practical public servants rather than political philosophers or political scientists, they worried, in Hunt’s words, ‘how long can you go on applying sticking plasters’ to the problem of the Prime Ministers burgeoning workload.53 Though both were Cabinet Office men, they, like Ferdy Mount later,fiknew full well that there were limits to what a thinly staffed

17 ,,

Cabinet Secretariat – whose primary role was servicing the Cabinet and its committees rather than briefing the premier - could be expected to provide.

Hunt put it very bluntly at the internationalconference in 1984 on advising rulers:

‘Other present or former members of the Cabinet Office may disagree with me, but I think it is still run on a shoe- string...advice to the Prime Minster from the Cabinet Office is thin and the question is whether it inadequate. Personally, I do not think it is. I doubt whether prime ministers on the whole [and Hunt had served four: Heath; Wilson; Callaghan and Thatcher] have felt that it was adequate either.’5j

.–—Eerdy-Mou n.t-a..decade-later-.was–equalfly..ci-t.i.c.cal_of–an_unchan.ged–s-c.ene:–

\...the briefs circulated to members of Cabinet and the separate “handlingbrief” provided for the Prime Minister exhale a studied neutrality; these briefs rehearse, in bland and unspecific form (partly, it must be said, for fear of leaks) the advantages and disadvantages of various coursesof action. But the pros and cons will be listed without nuance, and, more damagingly, with little or no hard argument or information.f

Such briefs, Ferdy tolda seminar of mine recently, shows ‘lack of enthusiasm for any option unless it be for doing nothing very much.’s’ Douglas Wass picked upon a similar strategic gap when in his Reith Lectures he called for a’system of well-briefed Cabinet ‘review’ committees.57

Very recently attention has returned to this particular aspect of what Hunt called the ‘hole in the centre of our constitution.’58Last summer Andrew Marr suggestedthat ‘the physical overload [enduredby modern prime ministers] is partly due to the grotesque inadequacyof the Number Ten [as opposed to the Cabinet Office] machine, which is understaffed, poorly organised, and badly

18 ,,

resourced for the job it has to do’ with the Prime Ministers’ Policy Unit distracted from its ‘forward-thinkingstrategic advice and pitfall-avoidance’ functions because it has to struggle ‘vainly with the daily and weekly agenda.’ Though the word is that under its new head, Norman Blackwell, it has returned to more longer-spectrum issues.59

Peter Mandelson is the latest contributor to the debate about meeting a Prime Ministers’ need for what John Hunt called earlier and deeper briefingw if his or her job, in Hunt’s words once more, as ‘guardian for the government’s strategy as a whole’, ‘the person with the unique overviewof all government activities’ and leader of their party to boot is to be adequately fulfilled.6’ But before examining the Mandelson proposals for a future central Blair machine that were published last week, it might be useful to reprise the options for improvementdrawn up by John Hunt (which reflected Ken Berrill’s thinking, too) on the basis ofhow the Heath, Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher Number 10s actually operated. There were four (to none of which John Hunt was strongly wedded.’a)

1: A full-blown Prime Ministers’ Department.

2: A strengthened Cabinet Office.

3: A merger of an old-style Central Policy Review Staff with the No.1O Policy Unit to form a new body that would work for the Prime Minister rather than the Cabinet as whole.

4: An enhanced Prime Minister’s Office with more advisers of the kind Mrs Thatcher acquired when first Sir Anthony Parsons and later Sir Percy Cradock (ex-diplomats both) were brought in to help her with foreign affairs.63

19 The Mandelson hybrid is rather different with more politics in it (which is not surprising given his formation compared to Hunt’s).

He identifies three essentials for Mr Blair if he is to be the transforming, two-term (at least) premier of turn-of-the-century Britain.

‘1: He has to get personal control of the central government machine and drive it hard, in the knowledge that if the government does not run the machine the machine will the run the government.

2: At the same time, he needs to use all his Ministers - and their civil servants and advisers to maximum effect in their departments...

3: He must sustain a vision of what the government is aiming for

. . . Iw

There follows some qualified words of pra se for Mrs Thatcher’s

, ‘statecraft’.65

How does this overal Mandelsonian strategy work through into the mechanics of the centre?

20 1: More and different advice, including political advice, available in No.1O. The political advice to come from a pair of politicians; ‘principal political adviser’ (a ministerial colleague, a Whitelaw kind of figure) and a more junior, lower profile political manager (who would not be a minister). A ‘beefed-up’ Policy Unit would complete the picture: ‘Such a lean and focused unit is probably preferable to the reintroduction of...the Central Policy Review Staff...’ti

2: A more ‘proactive’ Cabinet Office. ‘More akin to a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, charged with actively carrying forward the cross-departmentalpolicies [Mandelson likes Michael Bichard’s phrase about the ‘wicked issues’ that transcend individual Ministers and often get lost between theti7] agreed by the Cabinet with the Cabinet Secretary acting more in future like a policy-making permanent secretary than as a business manager and minute-taker.’w

3: A reshaped and beefed-up Treasury which will reflect a more collective and longer-term approach to economic policy-making and the allocation of resources.G9

4: A system of ‘superministers’chairing key Cabinet committees covering key areas of the government’s strategy and serviced by the ‘revamped Cabinet 0ffice’.70

5: A revitalised rather than a purged Civil Service, freed from the ‘colonisation’ (rather than the alleged ‘politicisation’)of the Conservative years since 1979, giving fearlesslyof its best to ministers who would also be helped by newly recruited specialists working with not against, the permanent staff. (With special advisers in the private office rather than French style cabinets for Cabinet Minsters.’l)

21 6: The Prime Minister’s Efficiency Unit to be retained.72

Most of the Mandelson analysis and prescription strikes me as sensible and workable including even the idea of Strategic Cabinet Committees chaired by ‘Superministers’.It is, after all, a suggestion very close to the idea of an inner cabinet consisting of the PM and strategic cabinet committee chairs which I suggested in my Gresham Series last year.7s

And it is rightly desirable that in the daily flow and treatment of government business the deeper questions are blended with immediate issues. For as Richard Wilding, Secretary of the Fulton Committee on the Civil Service a generation ago, has put it: ‘The long-term grows out of the day-to-day.’74

But to my mind there is one serious omission in the Mandelson schema. His ....__.._.beefed_up.Cab.i.net..Of.f-ice-needs-the_equ.i_v_al_ent_for_ec.onomicanddomesticpo licy of the Cabinet Office’s existing Joint Intelligence Organisation, the key feeder of the Overseas and Defence Policy Cabinet Committee. This is why I still argue for a revived CPRS merged with the Efficiency Unit (linking policy-making with implementation is always desirable) serving the Cabinetas , a whole, not just the PM, while filing that analytical-cum-briefinggap for both Cabinet and premier that Berrill, Hunt, Mount, Marr and Mandelson have decried.

The other reason for this approach, in Labour’s case, is presentational and political. Tony Blair strikes many (including some members of his Shadow Cabinet75)as likely to head firmly for the prime ministerial rather than the collegial end of the spectrum of premiership types. If he does so, there are dangers that for all his good intentions, there could be a perceived down grading of Cabinet government with its inevitable concomitant, the accumulation of Cabinet resentment that bursts out at moments of policy

setback and personal danger to the PM. This is a key lesson of the Thatcher Years -k great weakness in her ‘statecraft’–that must not be overlooked ignored.

22 . ,

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BY all means let us look to a refashioned premiership for the next century, with a re-skilling and a re-peopling of the job’s support systems. But the Cabinet, too – the key collegial mechanism - must be enabled to raise its collective game. Between it, the analysis of 16 years - from Berrill and Hunt to Marr and Mandelson – suggests that these two desirable objectives can be reconciled. It’s vital that they should be. Because, with the occasional exceptions (Lloyd George in 1916; perhaps Ted Heath in 1970) the system and its operators have always been at least one step behind the new demands and realities placed upon government-at-the-topby ’s celebrated ‘events’76and, in Victor Rothschild’s favourite phrase from Aldous Huxley,

by the ‘orgies’ which \punctuate’ the \routine’ of policy-making and administration.77And every day spent getting the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’78 of the twenty first century state right now, could save weeks, months and perhaps years of friction and inefficiency as the century turns.

OPeterHennessy

23 ,,, ,.

RHETORIC LECTURES 1995-96. LECTURE SIX ENDNOTES.

1. Observer, 24 May 1925. Cited in Anthony Jay (cd), The Oxford DictionarYof Pol~uotations, (OUP, 1996), p.

2. Lord Hailsham speaking to Anthony Clare, In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, BBC Radio 4,

3. Enoch Powell, ‘The Greatest of the Might-Have-Beens’ in A Rabantholoav chosen by Mollie Butler (published by Wilton 65, 1995 and privately distributed), p.79.

4. Nigel Nicolson, (cd), Harold Nic:l~o~: Diaries and Letters. 1939-45, (Fontana, 1970), Diary entry for 21 J 1 37 P. 5. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, (OUPWorld’s Classic series, 1983), Part II, p4.

6. Ibid, p.3.

7. He used the phrase in his 1874 Crystal Palace Speech; see Robert Blake, D-i-s~ae-l-i-,—--—------–———

8. Richard Hoggart, The Way We Live Now, (Chatto and Windus, 1995), p.280.

9. Roy Jenkins, ‘Churchill:The Government of 1951-1955’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Churchill, (OUP, 1993), p.493.

10. PublicRecordOffice,CAB21/1638, ‘Function of the Prime Minister and his Staff.’ For the genesis of this exercise see.Peter Hennessy, ‘Searching for the “Great Ghost”: The Palace, the Premiership, the Cabinet and the Constitution in the Post-War Period’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30, No.2, April 1995, pp.219-22.

11. The result of my 1995 exercise can be seen in Peter Hennessy, The-Hjdden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution, (Gollancz, 1995), pp.88 9 .

12. Ibid, pp.86-7.

13. Ibid, p.87.

14. Private Information.

15. PRO, PREM8/721A - 920.

16. F.W.S. Crai British General Election Manifesto, (Political Reference Publications, 1J~0), pp.143-7.

17. Martin Gilbert, Never DesDair: Winston Churchill, 1945-1965, (Heinemann, 1988), pp.748-9, 781-2, 797, ”835-6.

18. Ibid, pp.707-11, 675-83.

19. PRO, PREM 11/1-323.

20. Alistair Home, Macmillan 1957-1986, (Macmillan, 1989), pp.37-8.

24 . ,,

21. Salisbury’s actual words (in 1877) were: ‘No lesson seems so dee ly inculcated by the experience of life as that ou should never trust exper!s. If You believe the doctors, nothing is w{ olesome. if you believe the theolo ians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe. They a?1 require to have their strong wine diluted b a very Iar e admixt~[~ of insipid commonsense.’ Lafy~~g~olen Cecil, The Lire of LifeSa ! isbury, u, ( 7.. 22. PRO, PREM 11/2208-2581.

23. PRO, PREM 13/112-703.

‘Centre Forward, Centre Half: Herald Wilson, 1964-70’, ‘Premiership’ ~~~ture Four delivered at Gresham College on 6 February 1996.

~~~t!~;o~$img ~i~ikt~!, p~~~Son!iti~rMS~m!YT}~~ lM5~~t~!ll. King ‘cd)’ w

26. Conversation with Professor Richard Neustadt, 13 February 1996.

27. See Peter G. Moore, ‘Obituary: James Herald Wilson, 116-95’, The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, A, 1996, 159, Part I, pp.165-75.

28. Harold Wilson, The Governance of Britain, (Weidenfeldand M chael Joseph, 1976), p.85.

29. Ibid.

30. , The Downinq Street Years, (HarperCollins 1993), p.20.

31. Falkl~od ~g~3nds Review. ReDort ofa Committeeof PrivYCouncillors, Cmnd 87a7, 9 ); see especially paragraph 291, p.79. 32. ReDort of the InauirY into the ExDort of Defence EauiDment and Dual-~:e nd Related Prosecut~ons, House of Commons 115-1 to 3 102.5, 04.30, D1.a2, D1.91, D3.23-5, D3.165, D6.11:

33. Private Information.

34. Anthony Howard, RAB: The Life of R.A. Butler, (Cape, 1987), pp.292-3.

35. See Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring, Appendices, pp.249-51.

36. Ferdinand Mount, Umbrella, (Heinemann, 1994), p.163.

37. R.A.W. Rhodes, ‘Introducing the Core Executive’ in R.A.W. Rhodes and Patrick Dunleav (eds), Prime Minister. Cabinet and Core Executive, (Macmillan, 19951 , p.1. 3a. R.A.W. Rhodes, ‘From Prime Ministerial Power to Core Executive’ in ibid, p.12.

39. See John Turner, Lloyd Georqe’s Secretariat, (CUP, 19aO).

40. Private information.

41. Private information. Cited by the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Hunt of Tanworth (though he doesnot attribute it to Trend in Lord Hun~, ‘The United ~i~ dom’ in William Plowden (cd), Advisinq the dulers, (Blackwell, 19a7), . 8.

25 42. There have been four particular good accounts of Policy Unit life under various incarnations:Bernard Donoug{ue, ErirneMinister: The Conduct of Polic Under Herald Wilson and James Callaqhan, Cape, 1987 ; Ferdinand Mount,+ ~ British Consti ti~tt~w (Heinemann, 199 ) especial ~ p .129, 137-40 142, . ‘The Role oftheP ~me Minster s ;olic Unit’, public ~lminiskr~;;on vol 63. No.4 (Winter. 1987), DD.443-55; 2arah Hoq~ ~ -’Too ----Close to CalT: Power and Politics - John Ma.iorin No.10, (Little brown, lYYa).

43. Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency, (Manchester University Press, 1993), pp.120-47.

44. For Hunt’s anal sis see Lord Hunt of Tanworth, ‘Cabinet Strategy and Management’, CIPFA/R~PA Conference, Eastbourne, 9 June 1983 [sections of it are summarised or reproduced in Peter Hennessy’s, Cabinet (Blackwell, 1986 p.189-90]; for Berrill’s analysis see Sir Kennet~ll ‘Strength att i6 !entre - the Case for a Prime Minister’s De artment’, the Stamp Memorial Lecture, University of London 4 December 198t reproduced in King (cd), k British Prime Minister, pp.24~-57.

45. Sir Douglas Wass’ Reith Lectures were ublished the following year as Governance and the Governed, (Routledge, 19J4).

46. Mount, The British Constitution Now, see especially pp.137-40.

47. Andrew Marr, Rulinq Br~~nnia: The Failure and Future of British Democracy, (Michael Joseph, 1 5), pp.270-l.

48. Peter Mandelson and–Roger Liddle, The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? (Faber, 1996), pp.232-55.

49. The first tranche of 30-year releases I tackled at the PRO Press Review was the 1946 papers. I have not missed a batch since.

50. ‘Editorial comment: Holy politicians, Batman? Get serious!’ The Month, January 1996, p.2. , 51. For Mackintosh’s analysis of the development of rime ministerial overnment in the UK see John P. Mackintosh, The British Catinet, (University paperback), pp.6-7.

52. For Crossman’s version see his ‘Introduction’ to Walter Bagehot, ~ English Constitution, (Fontana, 1963), pp.1-57.

53. ‘The United Kingdom’, p.69.

54. Mount, The British Constitution Now, pp.138-9.

55. Hunt, ‘The United Kingdom’, p.69.

56. Mount The British Constitution Now p.138. His recent gloss was added during a ~Hidden Wiring’ Seminar as art of the MA in Contemporary British programme, Queen Mary and Westfield ?ollege, 24 January 1996.

57. Sir Dou las Wass, Government and the Governed. Cabinet: Directorate or BC Reith Lecture No.2 broadcast on 16 November 1993, on BBC m’ i

58. Hunt, ‘Cabinet Strategy and Management.’

59. Marr, Rulinq Britannia, p.271 and private information.

60. Hunt, ‘The United Kingdom’, p.69.

26 4 $ ,,

61. Hunt, ‘Cabinet Strategy and Management.’

62. Ibid. I 63. Ibid.

64. Mandelson and Liddle, The Blair Revolution, pp.235-6.

~ 65. Ibid. p.237.

66. Ibid, pp.240-l.

67. Private information. Michael Bichard is Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and Employment.

68. Mandelson and Liddle, The Blair Revolution, p.242.

69. Ibid, pp.245-6.

70. Ibid, pp.242-4. I 71. Ibid, pp.245-6.

72. Ibid, p.252.

73. Hennessy, The Hidden Wirinq, pp.114-5.

74. Richard Wildin addressing the ‘Hidden Wiring’ Seminar of the MA in Contemporary Britisi History programme, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 21 February 1946.

75. Private information.

76. See Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring, chapter seven.

I ,, 77. See Peter Hennessy, Susan Morrison and Richard Townsend, Routine Punctuated by Orgies: The Central Policv Review Staff, 1970-83, Stra_ Papers on Government and Politics, No.31, Department of Politics, University of Strathclyde, 1985.

78. These metaphors are Lord Bancroft’s. See Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring, p.26.

27 .,.

GRESHAM COLLEGE

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